Lawman Returns to Kentucky, Facing Bad Guys and Skeletons

“Justified” opens with a clever piece of misdirection. At first, all we can see is the big Stetson hat of Raylan Givens, the United States marshal played by Timothy Olyphant, as he climbs some stairs. It seems to promise a Western setting — a Texas street or a Utah canyon. But as he reaches the top step, palm trees come into view, and then cabanas, and then the rooftop pool of a Miami Beach hotel. The only cowboys here are of the cocaine variety.

It’s a visual joke worthy of the novelist Elmore Leonard, who created Givens and who is credited as an executive producer of “Justified,” a new series that begins Tuesday night on FX. (Givens has appeared in two Leonard novels and the short story “Fire in the Hole,” on which the show’s pilot was based.) And in the first few episodes it’s obvious — sometimes painfully so — that every effort is being made to do justice to the texture and humor of Mr. Leonard’s fiction.

The dialogue sometimes has a snap that’s rare, or let’s just say nonexistent, in prime time. After Givens shoots a man in that Florida hotel and then, upon being transferred to his home state of Kentucky, promptly shoots another, his new boss warns him that he might be getting a reputation. “Put it like this: If you was in the first grade, and you bit somebody every week, they’d start to think of you as a biter.”

Photo

Timothy Olyphant plays a United States marshal in “In “Justified,” a new Elmore Leonard-inspired series on FX.Credit
FX/Sony

An exchange between an excitable neo-Nazi and the soft-spoken Givens is elegant and to the point: “Who in the hell are you, the undertaker?”

And the show’s moral palette goes beyond the usual black and white of television crime dramas. The more or less good guys and the more or less bad guys often share a joking camaraderie, and everyone is sympathetic in some degree, however small. The measurement of character has less to do with righteousness than it does with resourcefulness and bravery, and the grace with which one faces the embarrassments of fate, which can include sudden, violent death.

For those of us already disposed to like shows about men with guns and secrets and senses of humor, “Justified” is in many ways an upgrade over what’s currently available; it’s “Burn Notice” with more soul. But in other ways, the people behind the show — including Graham Yost, the executive producer who developed it and wrote the pilot — have not solved the problem of how to translate Mr. Leonard’s style, intact, to the screen. That remains a feat that has been accomplished just once, by Steven Soderbergh in the film “Out of Sight.” (“Jackie Brown,” which was 100 percent Quentin Tarantino, doesn’t count.)

Mr. Leonard’s stories may not be full of dramatic incident, but they still proceed at an urgent, if not breakneck, pace. “Justified,” on the other hand, can feel so low-key that even the crisis points — like the repeated warnings, passed back and forth among Givens and various bad seeds, to leave town within 24 hours or be shot on sight — drift past without making much of an impression.

It feels as if the attention that should have gone to the storytelling all went to the atmosphere and the repartee. In the pilot, Givens gets the drop on a pair of white supremacists by climbing into the back seat of their car. In a subsequent episode he gets the drop on a pair of drug cartel hit men by climbing into the back seat of their car. Maybe it’s meant as a clever self reference, but it registers as a lack of imagination.

Mr. Olyphant, who starred in the HBO series “Deadwood” (and whose voice is eerily similar to that of Bill Paxton, a star of HBO’s “Big Love”), is also part of the problem. He doesn’t do anything wrong, exactly — his Givens is believably smart and courageous, and he has a nice touch with the sometimes oblique laugh lines. (Bad guy, pointing gun: “Marshal? Like in ‘Gunsmoke’?” Givens, cowering: “More like ‘The Fugitive.’ ”)

But he underplays so consistently that Givens, with his mixture of gunman’s swagger and lawman’s tortured conscience, doesn’t come alive the way he should. The sparkle isn’t there. George Clooney had it in “Out of Sight,” of course, and Carla Gugino and Robert Forster had some of it in the undeservedly short-lived ABC series “Karen Sisco,” which is why that was a better show than “Justified” (so far), even though it had less of the Leonard vibe.

The lesson may be that Mr. Leonard’s hipster-hoodlum sang-froid — a highly artful, which is to say artificial, construct — is simply easier to achieve on the page. That doesn’t negate the modest virtues of “Justified,” which include solid supporting performances by Nick Searcy, as Givens’s boss, and Erica N. Tazel, as a young marshal.

And the funny parts are worth waiting for, like the guest appearance by Clarence Williams III — who played a bad guy in one of the better Leonard adaptations, “52 Pick-Up” — as an ornery Vietnam vet who delivers a wickedly offensive tirade to two young male cops. The only parts that can be reprinted here: “Mekong Delta” and “you and your boyfriend.”

A version of this review appears in print on March 16, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lawman Returns to Kentucky, Facing Bad Guys and Skeletons. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe